Good Should be affordablePocket-friendly Bad Cheap constructionLow-resolution screenLow-power processor Are you young and short on cash, but rich in longing for a Samsung Galaxy smart phone? If so, the Samsung Galaxy Y could be just the ticket. It cuts down on some higher-end specs so that it can come at a lower price. The exact pricing and availability haven’t been confirmed yet, but the Y will sit at the bottom end of the Galaxy range, so we expect it to be free on a £10-per-month contract.
Design The Galaxy Y is instantly recognisable as part of Samsung’s Galaxy range. Quite apart from the Samsung branding, it looks rather like a short, stumpy Galaxy S2. Black and grey tones are splashed all over, with a subtle chrome effect on the edge of the handset.
The Y is all very ‘Samsung’, which is either good or bad news, depending on your taste and whether or not you like the other Galaxy phones. It’s certainly not an ugly phone, and we reckon it has a smidgen more class than HTC’s Wildfire S, which is arguably the Y’s closest competitor.
The phone is only 104mm long and weighs 98g, so it’s certainly small enough to fit into even the tiniest of hands, and will slide into those skinny jeans without too much trouble.
The Y doesn’t feel particularly sturdy, though, so we don’t recommend you throw it around too much. It doesn’t necessarily feel poorly built — it’s more that it feels like it’s made out of low-grade materials. It certainly doesn’t have the sturdy feel of its bigger brothers.
Screen The Y packs a 3-inch touchscreen with a 240×320-pixel resolution. You may be thinking that this sounds like a low resolution — and you’d be right. But, while the display can’t match the glorious Super AMOLED Plus screen on the Galaxy S2, the Y will be much more affordable, so we have to cut it some slack.
The screen seemed perfectly adequate in our hands-on tests, displaying photos and text well. But the Y won’t be a great phone for browsing the Web. With a 320-pixel vertical resolution, plenty of scrolling and zooming will be required to zoom in on the right part of a page.
Performance Under the hood of the little Galaxy Y is an 832MHz processor. In terms of today’s smart phones, 832MHz really isn’t that much. Many phones, even at the lower to mid-range, pack 1GHz chips.
Still, if you just need to send some texts and tweet every so often, you probably won’t need much more power. But, if intensive apps and serious multitasking are on your agenda, you’ll find the Galaxy Y lacking. Mobile gamers should probably look elsewhere.
The Galaxy Y runs Android 2.3 Gingerbread, which felt fairly smooth and responsive during our tests. Once you start loading the phone up with any of the hundreds of thousands of apps in the Android Market, as well as live home-screen widgets, you’ll notice a reduction in performance,
Samsung has slapped the TouchWiz interface over the top of Android. This allows you to customise more of the menus, as well as take advantage of Swype, which lets you type on the virtual keyboard insanely quickly.
You’ll also get access to Samsung’s social, games and music hubs, which, as the names suggest, aim to bring together social-networking, games and music services. We’re all for anything that helps us to tweet about our food more quickly.
Conclusion The Samsung Galaxy Y isn’t the most beautiful of the Galaxy clan, nor is it the most powerful. But, if it comes with the bargain-basement price tag we expect, it may well find a place in the pockets of many folk who can’t afford a Galaxy S2.